Kraków

The currency is the złoty (zł, PLN), trading at about 4.3 zł to the euro in 2026; the euro doesn't circulate, and paying with it in shops costs you. Contactless cards work almost everywhere, including at the obwarzanek stand and the tram ticket machine, and the local BLIK system dominates mobile payments. Withdraw from bank ATMs (PKO BP, Pekao, ING, Santander), not the convenience ATMs on tourist streets, and decline the “conversion to your currency” offered on screen: being charged in złoty is always cheaper. Price ranges in 2026: espresso 12–18 zł, a 0.5 l draft beer 15–25 zł in the center, a bar mleczny meal 20–35 zł. A main course at a mid-range restaurant runs 45–75 zł, dinner for two with drinks 160–260 zł, a hostel bed 70–130 zł and a three-star hotel 300–500 zł a night. Tipping isn't mandatory: 10% at restaurants with table service is customary, left in cash or stated before the card is run. Watch out for a language trap: saying thank you to the waiter just as you pay counts as telling him to keep the change. Kraków doesn't charge a tourist tax yet. Since 2023 city hall has been asking for the change in national law that would allow it, and it wasn't in force as of September 2026.

John Paul II Airport: 11 km, with a train at the terminal

John Paul II Airport (KRK) is in Balice, 11 km west. The fastest way into the center is the train from the station attached to the terminal, which leaves every 30 minutes and takes about 20 minutes to Kraków Główny. The fare is around 20 zł, from the machine or from the conductor on board. Don't look for a ticket office; you don't need one. Bus routes 208 and 300 cover the same route more slowly, and the 902 runs overnight. A rideshare to the Rynek costs 80–120 zł. Kraków Główny central station is buried under the Galeria Krakowska mall, a five-minute walk from St. Florian's Gate, and handles the long-distance trains. Warsaw is about 2 hours 20 minutes away by Pendolino, Katowice 1 hour and Zakopane around 3 hours. The MDA bus station is on the same block and is where buses leave for Oświęcim, Wieliczka and the mountains.

Twenty-five tram lines around the Planty

Inside the city the system runs on MPK trams and buses, with about 25 tram lines circling the four sides of the Planty. The interior of the historic center is closed to cars. Fares went up on March 2, 2026: a 15-minute ticket is 4 zł, a 60-minute one 8 zł, a single ride 6 zł and a group ticket for up to 20 people 50 zł within the urban area. There are 24-, 48- and 72-hour passes and a 7-day one, in the range of roughly 20 to 60 zł after the increase. Buy from the stop machine or the one on board, both of which take cards, or through the jakdojade and mobiLET apps, and validate a paper ticket at the yellow machine as soon as you get on. The fine for riding without validation runs over 250 zł, and the inspector won't take an excuse. In practice, almost everything is done on foot: Wawel to the Barbican is 20 minutes, Kazimierz to the Rynek, 15. For Nowa Huta, trams 4 and 22 take about 30 minutes. There are app bikes and scooters and a bike lane on both sides of the Vistula. The uneven cobblestones downtown punish rolling luggage and heels.

Kraków is a safe city to walk in, including at night, and violent crime against visitors is rare. The real problems are small and predictable. There are pickpockets on trams 8, 18 and 52, in the line at St. Mary's and in the crush of the Rynek in December, and taxis waiting outside the station and the airport that charge three times the fare. Some bars in the Old Town and Kazimierz run up a tab with no clear prices, especially when someone approaches you on the street offering “a better place,” so ask for the menu before you sit down. On Friday and Saturday nights, the stretch between Szewska street and Plac Szczepański is full of bachelor parties and heavy drinking: it's noisy but not dangerous, and it's worth detouring along a side street. Unofficial guides approach visitors near the Rynek and the station selling tours to Auschwitz; buy only through official channels. Emergency: 112. There are 24-hour pharmacies in several neighborhoods and public emergency care works, but travel insurance is a formal requirement for entering the Schengen Area. Brazilians still enter visa-free for up to 90 days in any 180. The EES biometric border registration began rolling out at the end of 2025, and the ETIAS electronic authorization is scheduled to take effect during 2026. Confirm the requirement before buying your ticket.

Greet on the way in

Say “dzień dobry” on entering a shop, bakery, office or elevator, and “do widzenia” on the way out. Walking in silently reads as rude, not as discretion.

Take your shoes off at the door

Invited to an apartment, take your shoes off at the entrance without waiting to be asked. Many homes keep guest slippers on hand, and insisting on staying shod embarrasses the host.

Flowers in odd numbers

A bouquet for a host or birthday person always comes with an odd number of stems. Chrysanthemums are a cemetery flower, associated with November 1, and are never brought to a home.

How vodka is drunk in Poland

The small glass is drunk in one go, after the toast “na zdrowie”, and always with food on the table. Sipping vodka slowly through the meal isn't part of local custom.

At places of memory, cemetery silence

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Remuh cemetery and Ghetto Heroes Square, don't take selfies or talk loudly. Men cover their heads in the Jewish cemetery and the Remuh synagogue; there are kippahs at the entrance.

A working church isn't a museum

St. Mary's and most churches downtown hold mass several times a day, and tourists enter through a separate door at a separate time. Don't move around during a service, don't use flash, and cover shoulders and knees.

Oświęcim without a booking

Showing up at Oświęcim without a pass bought in advance. The physical ticket counter is gone, and anyone who tries to buy on the spot simply doesn't get in. In spring and summer the time slots vanish six to eight weeks ahead.

Poland uses the złoty

Counting on the euro. Poland uses the złoty, and any place that accepts euros applies a bad exchange rate. Withdraw from a bank ATM, decline the conversion-into-home-currency the machine offers, and pay in złoty.

The “0% commission” exchange booth

Changing money at the kantors advertising “0% commission” on Floriańska street or around the edge of the Rynek. The built-in margin eats 8% to 12%; the side-street exchange offices, two or three blocks from the square, quote the real rate.

A carriage without a fixed price

Getting into a horse carriage on the Rynek or a taxi parked outside the station without agreeing on a price first. Use Bolt, Uber or FreeNow: a ride within the center is rarely more than 40 zł.

The whole trip inside the Planty

Spending the whole trip inside the Planty ring. Kazimierz, Podgórze and Nowa Huta, outside it, hold the deepest marks of the 20th century, so set aside at least one day to cross the ring toward Kazimierz and, on the other side of the Vistula, Podgórze.

Dzień dobry

Good morning / good afternoon (djen DOH-bri): the standard greeting on entering any establishment

Dziękuję

Thank you (jen-KOO-yeh): said when handing over the bill, it means “keep the change”

Poproszę…

I'd like… (po-PRO-sheh): the formula for ordering anything at the counter

Przepraszam

Sorry / excuse me (pshe-PRA-sham): used to get past someone and to call the waiter

Ile to kosztuje?

How much does it cost? (EE-leh to kosh-TOO-yeh)

Na zdrowie

Cheers / bless you (na ZDROH-vyeh). The vodka toast, and also what you say to someone who sneezes

The Vistula valley and the limestone

Kraków sits at about 220 m of altitude, in the upper Vistula valley, between the limestone plateau of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland to the north, full of crags and caves, and the hills climbing toward the Carpathians to the south, with the Tatras about 100 km away. The river runs west to east and bends at the foot of Wawel, a Jurassic limestone outcrop riddled with caves. One of them, Smocza Jama, is open to visitors.

The Planty ring and the riverbanks

The whole medieval center sits on the north bank, inside a ring of about 4 km: the Planty traces exactly the line of the walls torn down between 1810 and 1830, which is why the center is an oval rather than a square. Kazimierz occupies a former island between two branches of the river; the southern branch was filled in around 1880 and became Dietla street, which explains its disproportionate width. South of the Vistula lie Podgórze and the limestone hills of Krzemionki, with Krakus and Piłsudski mounds; to the east opens the plain that made room for the steelworks and Nowa Huta, and to the west the Wolski forest and Balice airport.

The trapped winter air

The closed-in valley is also a breathing problem: in winter cold air gets trapped over the city, and Kraków posts some of Poland's worst particulate-matter readings between November and February, despite the coal ban since 2019.

Two Nobel laureates in literature living in the city

Kraków has been a UNESCO City of Literature since 2013 and had two Nobel laureates living in it at the same time: Czesław Miłosz, awarded in 1980, who returned from exile in 1993 and has been buried in the Skałka crypt since 2004, and Wisława Szymborska, awarded in 1996, who lived in an ordinary apartment until she died in 2012. Stanisław Lem wrote almost all of his science fiction here. The stage tradition is just as old: the Stary Teatr has run since 1781, the Piwnica pod Baranami cabaret has occupied the basement of a Rynek townhouse since 1956, and Tadeusz Kantor staged with Cricot 2 the plays that took Polish theater on international tours in the 1970s and 1980s.

Philharmonic, early music and basements

In music, the city supports the Kraków Philharmonic, an early-music season during Holy Week, and two avant-garde festivals in autumn: Sacrum Profanum, which tends to occupy Nowa Huta's industrial warehouses, and Unsound, dedicated to experimental electronic music, active since 2003. Krzysztof Penderecki trained at the local academy and conducted much of his career from here. In visual arts, the Manggha museum of Japanese art was built in 1994 at Andrzej Wajda's initiative with money from the Kyoto Prize, and MOCAK opened in 2011 on the grounds of Schindler's factory. There is also a circuit of jazz cellars around the Rynek, a legacy of the 1950s, when the genre was tolerated with suspicion by the regime.

University: 130,000 students in twenty institutions

The university organizes daily life: about 130,000 students across a little over twenty institutions, led by the Jagiellonian and the AGH polytechnic, which keeps bars cheap, secondhand bookshops in business and rentals hard to find from October to June. Religion is visible everywhere: Karol Wojtyła was archbishop here from 1964 to 1978, and the Łagiewniki sanctuary, consecrated in 2002, draws pilgrimages year-round. In soccer, the Wisła–Cracovia derby is called the “holy war” and splits the city by neighborhood; Cracovia, founded in 1906, is the oldest club in Poland still active. At night, life concentrates in two hubs: the block of streets west of the Rynek and the squares of Kazimierz.

Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Filmed in Kazimierz and around Płaszów; it rebuilds the Lipowa street factory and the liquidation of the Podgórze ghetto in March 1943. Watching it before entering the factory museum changes what you see there.

Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)

It follows the making of a worker-hero during the construction of Nowa Huta in the 1950s and the unmaking of the myth two decades later. It explains why the district has the shape it has.

Poems, by Wisława Szymborska

An anthology by Wisława Szymborska, 1996 Nobel laureate and a poet Kraków claims as its own; the Brazilian edition came out in 2011, translated by Regina Przybycien. The poems take on big subjects in a conversational tone, with irony and a distrust of all grandiloquence.